Background: Research in the field of school-bullying has been expanding for at least three decades while research in cyber-bullying is still evolving. There has been an enormous amount of empirical works and projects throughout the years, all aiming to understand how bullying functions, the motivation behind such behaviour, the related factors, the consequences, and of course to create efficient prevention and intervention models. However, in spite of the continuous efforts to decrease the rates for both forms, previous research has shown that school-bullying remains stable whereas cyber-bullying is on the rise and evolving.

Aim: This three-year project aimed to explore highly studied as well as neglected risk and preventive factors in relation to SB and CB; examine relationships, differences, and predictive effects, whilst providing a comparison of the factors’ effect on SB and CB.

Methodology: For this project 408 participants were recruited to complete the online survey in Google Forms. The questionnaire aimed to measure school-bullying and cyber-bullying both from the perspective of the victim and the perpetrator, empathy, self-esteem, aggression, anger, impulsivity, self-control, guilt, morality, copying strategy/minimisation, factors related to family, and friends. To achieve these 11 previously validated scales were employed and a series of questions were constructed to measure other related aspects.

Findings: Results showed that there are complicated relationships, differences, and predictive effects between the factors and the two forms of bullying, with some factors relating to both forms of bullying, while there appears to be an overlap between the two forms. To collectively present the results, a four-level model was developed and the school-bullying/cyber-bullying prevention/intervention model emerged.

Conclusion: Bullying is a complicated phenomenon regardless of the expressed form. There are numerous gaps in research that require further examination and several limitations that future research should address. In spite of the current project’s limitations that are addressed in detail, this project managed to provide a collective comparative picture of risk factors for both forms of bullying and has developed a detailed anti-bullying model that could potentially tackle both school-bullying and cyber-bullying.

This thesis addressed the bystander intervention gap in the workplace bullying literature. Bystanders are employees, other than the bully or target, who are present when bullying occurs. They are well placed to intervene but often they do not. Previous research suggested that increased bystander intervention may lead to a reduction in workplace bullying. Although suggestions for bystander intervention in workplace bullying were found in the literature none had been implemented or measured. As field research this thesis addressed a real-world problem. The participating employees were from a large, mainland UK organisation where workplace verbal bullying had been identified as a problem. Therefore a strategy for bystander intervention in workplace verbal bullying was designed, implemented and measured. The new Responsible Intervention Decision Strategy (RIDS)model combined existing theories on the bystanders’ decision process and responsibility to support bystander intervention. This quantitative study developed and validated a new 15 item Responsible Bystander Intervention in Verbal Bullying (RBI-VB) metric. The concise metric was incorporated into a practical, single-page survey to test the RIDS model in the field. Shop-floor employees participated in pre and post-intervention surveys (N = 1501) and one of four conditions. The RBI-VB metric demonstrated that responsible bystander intervention was positively correlated to bystander willingness to intervene in workplace verbal bullying. This could be increased with RIDS-based training or the in-house campaign; and was positively correlated to self-reported bystander intervention. The study is limited as it took place within a single UK organisation. However, the findings demonstrated the efficacy of the RIDS model and the practical application of the RBI-VB metric for baseline measurements, monitoring and to assess bystander intervention programmes. Willingness to intervene can be increased and this relates to actual intervention but most bystander intervention was carried out by previous targets of workplace verbal bullying. The implications are discussed.

This study arises from two contextualised problems faced by the students at the Faculty of Applied Sciences (FAS) of a small university in Sri Lanka. These problems are: students’ lecture comprehension difficulties and limited oral language proficiency in their second language (i.e. English). The ideas developed in this study are based on the argument that dialogic lecturer student interaction, which enables students to take a more active role in discussions compared to the use of recitation scripts (questions-answers evaluations) developed in non-dialogic interactions, is likely to be beneficial for students’ content and language development. Although there have been studies at primary level, there has so far been little research into dialogic interaction in tertiary-level L1 Science classes, and none yet carried out in the L2 context. Therefore, this study investigates the extent of dialogic interaction practised at FAS, in conjunction with a thorough consideration of the factors that influence interaction between lecturers and students. This study, involving 30 students and 4 lecturers, was undertaken as a pioneer study in this context in Asia by analysing L2 lectures given at FAS. Data were collected from lecturer and student questionnaires, lecturer interviews, student group interviews, observations of 24 lectures and audio recordings. Of the observed lectures, a total of 12 from Biotechnology, Animal Physiology, Physics and Statistics were transcribed verbatim and analysed using an analytical framework, which was especially designed to analyse the FAS lecture discourse. This framework was also used to locate these lectures on a scale from monologic to dialogic. The study revealed the complexity of the perception-practice dynamic, and the multi-faceted sub-set of factors which influenced students’ and lecturers’ behaviour in class, and their perception of that behaviour. Students’ lecture comprehension problems and classroom interaction were influenced by their language proficiency, though the students considered the lecturers’ lecture delivery style to be more important than their own language proficiency. In this study it was revealed that a culturally embedded behaviour perpetuated by senior students, known as ragging (a kind of bullying), restricted the classroom interaction of the students. In terms of lecture delivery style, of all the observed lectures only two contained some interactional episodes in addition to monologic segments, while the others were found to be highly or mostly monologic. Students were also found not to be cooperating with lecturers in classroom interaction, despite stating a preference for learning through interaction. The students asked only very few questions in all the observed lectures, and answered in a limited number of lectures. The lecturers asked more knowledge testing questions than any other kind, while there were only a few concept development questions – the type which can help develop dialogic interaction. Overall, this investigation, which demonstrates the importance of combining studies of perception with detailed analysis of the discourse itself, indicates limited lecturer student interaction as well as a clear lack of dialogic interaction in English-medium Science lectures at this particular university. In addition, it is argued that the innovative analytical framework designed to analyse the lectures delivered in the English Medium Instruction (EMI) context of the present study can be useful for other lectures which are commonly delivered as monologic in both L1 and L2 contexts. Finally, it also stresses the importance of investigating the influence of cultural and behavioural factors, such as ragging, on classroom learning.